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What made that David Seymour being a dork story remarkably unusual, is that the MSM used a screen shot to show Seymour posting stupid shit on Instagram ( now owned by Facebook). That got people very angry, then it all spilled out over to Twitter (grown ups).

Wordpress the other big blue abyss. Blue – because it keeps you awake at night.

I went to catch up on some of Deborah’s blogging at Wordpress but found a private, no public access sign at the door. That’s understandable, and healthy. So I asked the gatekeeper. That’s Wordpress, if they could pass the message to Deborah, that it’s me at the door, and I’ll promise not to spam the place up, use bad language and leave there what I see there. But the gate keeper turned out to be an algorithm much the same as the other big “social media” platforms use.

This is what I got after I signed up. Not what I was looking for; permission to read Deborah’s blog. I got this yellow and black tailed wasp nest.

A daily selection of the best content published on WordPress, collected for you by humans who love to read.

Like fuck it is! And it didn’t ask Deborah if I could visit her pages after all my logging in palaver. Those algorithms are not human at all. They are designed by dubious humans, to exploit other humans.

Reading all the about page leaves me wondering which of what they publish is real news, and what’s been manufactured to order.

Wondering if it's a wise move on the Spinoff's part to run a picture of what purports to be their actual production line. A bit like hot dogs, knowing how they're made can kill your enthusiasm for the end product.

But they can make a good sausage. There is a big in depth article about Contactless debit cards. It’s comforting to see the influential powers of journalism question these seemingly benign behaviours. That the convenience and stylishness of cool people waving the card rather than stopping and preforming a cash transaction or doing the eftpos, is costing all of us, collectively, only a few hundred million dollars. But it’s not nice for small retailers, for financial and interpersonal reasons.

All good, but:

What could possibly be bad about this, you cry! I love to tap, tap tap! (And the response on Twitter was strongly in favour – we love to tap and go)

And:

(just search no paywave on Twitter to test the temperature of those who really want to tap and can’t).